


i happen to like nice men

by spirnuise



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-13 03:21:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5692663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spirnuise/pseuds/spirnuise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Rey first meets Poe Dameron, she doesn’t know who he is, only that he’s standing outside Finn’s sick bay door like he’s been waiting for her to come out of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i happen to like nice men

When Rey first meets Poe Dameron, she doesn’t know who he is, only that he’s standing outside Finn’s sick bay door like he’s been waiting for her to come out of it. She’s on her way to the Falcon, but she stops, a little startled that someone else is here.

“I’m sorry,” says the pilot. Rey thinks she remembers seeing him when they arrived. He looks like he hasn’t changed out of his flight suit since then; his face is tired. “I didn’t want to disturb you.”

“That’s alright,” Rey says uncomfortably. “I’m just…leaving, you can… do you know Finn?”

“He saved my life,” says the pilot. His eyes are kind.

“Mine, too,” Rey finds herself saying, and it’s true: Finn trusted her. Finn came back for her. Finn brought her a new family.

“You’re Rey,” says the pilot. Everyone knows that, now. Rey’s never even been somewhere with this many people, let alone this many people who _know who she is_ , as if she’s someone important. “I’m Poe.”

“Poe Dameron?” Rey asks, surprised. “Finn said…”

“Desert didn’t get me,” Poe says with a smile. Tentatively, Rey smiles back.

“Does he know you’re alive?” she asks, nodding towards Finn.

“He asked me for help getting you back,” says Poe. “It was the first thing he did when he got here.”

Like on the Starkiller Base, the well of gratitude tinged with disbelief sticks in her throat. Rey doesn’t have a lot of practice hiding her emotions – not enough people in the desert to hide from – so she knows Poe sees her swallow and blink hard. He doesn’t say anything, just looks through the glass of the door at Finn, still unconscious in the austere room full of the hum of technology.

“He’s a good man,” Poe says, like he’s said it before. Rey doesn’t think she’s imagining a thickness to his voice, too.

“Yeah,” says Rey. Poe looks back at her. “Keep him safe,” she says, trusting him, somehow, to be there when Finn wakes, even if she can’t be.

“I will,” Poe says.

She leaves surer than before, and when General Organa hugs her goodbye, Rey thinks that there was something of her about Poe.

 

It’s a week before Finn wakes. Around him are glass walls – fleetingly, he thinks, _I got more privacy than this with the Order_ – but no one seems to be around. Maybe it’s the middle of the night. He can’t tell; all the lights are on, warmer and softer than the hallways he’s been seeing in his dreams.

The next thing he notices is that he’s not alone in the room: Poe is slumped, endearingly, in a chair a few feet from Finn’s bed, his head rolled back against the wall. He’s making a little whistling noise when he breathes. Finn smiles so wide his face hurts. One of the machines around his bed whirrs and beeps, and Finn winces as Poe stirs, head lolling to the side before he blinks awake.

Finn starts to say, “I didn’t mean to wake you,” but he falters at the way Poe’s face lights up with joy and disbelief.

“Finn! Buddy!” Poe exclaims. It’s all Finn can do to smile helplessly back as Poe leaps out of his chair to Finn’s bedside, stopping just short of touching Finn. His hands come to rest tentatively on the bedspread. It’s the first time Finn’s seen him look uncertain.

“Hi,” Finn says, looking up at Poe. Despite a night of sleep in an uncomfortable chair, Poe looks as good as he had climbing out of his X-wing the day Finn arrived here. One of Poe’s hands hovers closer to Finn’s, and without thinking, Finn reaches out and takes it. Surprise flickers across Poe’s face, and then a warmth that makes Finn remember all over again the feeling of seeing Poe alive.

“Hi,” Poe says back, his thumb moving across Finn’s wrist. If his back didn’t hurt so much, Finn thinks, he’d be content with stopping time right here.

 _Fuck,_ Finn realizes, his back hurts.

Poe sees him flinch. “Are you okay?” he asks, making to draw his hand back like it’s somehow his fault. Finn holds on tighter.

“I’m fine,” Finn says. “Guess you don’t get a bed this comfortable for no reason, right?”

Poe laughs. “Wish I could tell you your real bed’s gonna be just as good, but we’re on a budget here.”

“Real bed” sounds good enough to Finn, and so does “we.” He doesn’t know how to say what he’s thinking, though; just squeezes Poe’s hand and hopes it gets across.

They’re quiet for a moment, then Finn asks, “How long have I been here?”

“A week today,” says Poe like he’s been counting. With a look at Finn’s face, he adds, “Don’t worry, you haven’t missed much.”

“I didn’t think…” Finn had never been out for more than a day or two with injuries in the Order, not that it had ever been particularly pleasant to wake up. They had their own methods. “Wait,” he says, realizing abruptly what’s been nagging at him. “Where’s Rey?” The thing is, he can feel her – a presence in the back of his mind that’s faint but so unmistakably Rey’s that he’s only just realized she’s not actually _here_.

“She’s gone to find Luke,” says Poe. He says _Luke_ the way he says _General Organa_ , reverential and warm.

“Seriously?” asks Finn. It’s not so much surprise as a mixture of pride, and excitement for her, and the sudden knowledge that she’s planets away. They just got her back – and with that thought comes a spike of pain at the memory of what they had seen on the bridge.

Watching him, Poe says, “She asked me to look after you.”

“You met?” Finn asks. Despite everything, his heart jumps a little.

“Yeah,” says Poe, and Finn gets lost in watching him smile. “Out in the hall, before she left.”

“She was here?” Finn can almost remember her saying something to him, like maybe it filtered down into his dreams. The presence of her that he can’t convince himself he’s imagining is steady and comforting, like Poe’s hand is in his.

“She cares a lot about you,” Poe is saying. It’s not like this is something Finn’s heard a lot, but somehow –

“I know,” he says, and just like earlier, he does what he wants to do instead of thinking about it – pulls Poe’s hand closer and kisses it. He takes a moment to be touched that Poe’s whole body follows the movement to make sure Finn doesn’t strain his back. “I knew you’d like each other,” he says, smiling, against Poe’s knuckles.

Jess Pava, heading down to the medical wing with a question for Poe because everyone knows where he can be found these days, glances into Finn’s room and swiftly turns back down the hallway.

* * *

The longer Rey is away, the more restless Finn gets, despite his undimming awareness of her and Poe’s efforts to get him to relax. Finn knows this is important – not just to the Resistance, but to Rey herself – and he figures Luke Skywalker isn’t exactly easy to find. And Rey can take care of herself (Finn knows that better than anybody). It’s just. He _misses_ her.

“She’s coming back,” Poe says one day. They’re in Finn’s room – he’s no longer confined to the bed in the medical wing, but he isn’t supposed to be up much. Poe’s hand is idly massaging Finn’s scalp.

“I know that,” says Finn, turning to face Poe in surprise and almost dislodging his hand (which Finn would have deeply regretted). “I know she’s coming back, I just…wish she’d come back faster _._ ”

Poe is smiling at him. As ever, Finn can’t help but to smile back. If there’s anything he’s learned over the past two weeks – which have been a whirlwind of the foreign culture that is the Resistance, though Finn has a feeling everyone’s been trying to give him his space – it’s that Poe is infectious. When he smiles, so does everyone in sight (even the General, sometimes). Finn can’t blame them.

Poe stays for another hour or two before he’s called away to do whatever it is he does on base, besides raising morale by merely existing and greeting anyone and everyone with a clap on the back and relentless sincerity. He looks absurdly regretful when he leaves, like he’s leaving Finn to waste away in loneliness.

“I’m fine,” Finn says, waving him off, and bites his lip against the wholly unexpected feeling of being so cared for.

He spends the rest of the day moving around his room, still trying to figure out what he can do without angering the still-healing muscles of his back. He would have given into the urge to sneak outside and wander the hallways twenty minutes after Poe left – has, in fact, been doing that with and without Poe as a willing accomplice – except that last time, General Organa had caught him in the mess hall and given him such a Look that Finn felt bad for even thinking about it.

(“Not that I wouldn’t be doing the exact same thing in his place,” the General tells Poe with a wry smile, when Poe comes back from walking Finn to his room and tries to claim all responsibility.)

Evening comes soon enough (Finn feels better, but he still gets much more tired than he used to), and Finn falls asleep reaching for the faint glow of Rey’s presence.

 

Finn opens his eyes in the morning full of anticipation. He doesn’t know exactly why, until he realizes that the flicker of Rey in the back of his mind is much stronger than when he went to sleep. Forgetting entirely the prospect of getting a Look from the General for being up, he gets dressed and goes to find Poe.

“Buddy!” Poe stands up to hug Finn in the mess hall, like that’s just something people do. For all Finn has an excuse to know, it is, so he hasn’t been complaining.

“Hey,” he says as Poe pulls away. He grins, and Poe grins back. Finn hears one of the other pilots at the table cough suspiciously and get thumped on the back.

“What’s up?” Poe asks, sitting back down and making room for Finn next to him on the bench. Finn shakes his head.

“Rey’s coming back today,” he says. His hands make a jittery little motion, his excitement trying to escape.

“How do you know?” asks Poe, confused. Finn hasn’t mentioned the way he can sense Rey to Poe. Poe wouldn’t laugh at him, but it’s not something Finn knows how to explain; all he knows is it’s real enough to him, especially today.

He’s trying to think of a way to put that into words when he catches sight of General Organa entering the mess hall on the other side of the room. “Whoops, gotta go,” he says, ducking in the other direction. It’s a credit to Poe’s character that Finn can hear him laughing on his way out. Finn is grinning as he picks a direction at random to get away from the mess hall.

* * *

 Poe’s gaze follows Finn out the door, which gets him an elbow in the side from Jess.

“Hey,” he says mildly. He knows full well he’s being disgusting, but they should expect this from him by now.

He says as much, and Connie shakes her head at him before ignoring him completely in favor of the conversation she’s having about equipment upgrades with Lors. Poe goes back to smiling into his breakfast.

By afternoon, he hasn’t seen Finn again – he’s probably hiding somewhere he hopes the General won’t find him, which Poe could tell him from experience tends to be a lost cause. If Poe had to guess, he’d say Finn is with Senno in the gardens. He’d taken Finn there once while showing him around the base and Finn had been so interested they hadn’t even gone anywhere else. Poe had just sat nearby and listened to Senno explain to Finn what they were growing, and how, and what it was good for. They’d sent a little potted plant back with Finn that now stood by his bed, closing softly at night and opening with a chirp in the morning.

For lack of anything else to do, Poe heads out to his X-wing. BB-8 is already there, beeping back and forth with one of the other pilots’ droids. As Poe approaches, he catches his name and something that sounds like affectionate but not all-too-respectful droid slang.

“Not you too,” he says. BB-8 whirls around in an extremely convincing display of “who, me?”

“Yeah, okay, buddy,” Poe says as BB-8 rolls under the fighter to be lifted up where it can help Poe with maintenance.

Just then there’s the unmistakable sound of a ship coming out of hyperdrive, and the Millennium Falcon appears in the sky.

By the time it’s sailed in for a perfect landing – Rey’s one hell of a pilot, Poe thinks – half the Resistance is outside. Poe doesn’t even have time to think _I need to get Finn_ before he sees him, like Finn knew the Falcon was coming without anybody telling him. (Hadn’t he said so, this morning?) BB-8 zooms after him.

Finn runs to Rey like he had run to Poe, shouting, “Rey!” (He shouldn’t be running, thinks Poe, shouldn’t even be _up_ ; wouldn’t be, were he anyone else.)

“Finn!” she’s yelling back. BB-8 is beeping happily and rolling in circles around their feet as Rey wraps her arms around Finn. Finn is wearing Poe’s jacket; Poe sees Rey’s hands tighten in it over Finn’s back.

After a second, Finn holds her at arm’s length, like he needs to see her face. “I knew you’d come back,” he says, hands grasping at her arms, her shoulders.

“Of course I came back,” Rey says, catching Finn’s hands and holding them tight. She’s smiling so bright Poe can feel her joy where he’s standing. It takes his breath away; he crosses his arms and clutches surreptitiously at his elbows to try and regain his balance. Abruptly, he realizes he’s standing next to the General. He turns, expecting a raised eyebrow and a knowing look (he’s had plenty of those from her in his life, and from everyone else in recent days), but instead General Organa is watching Rey and Finn.

She looks far away, like what she sees isn’t the two of them clutching each other at the feet of the Falcon but a memory, long-ago and treasured, playing out before her.

When Luke Skywalker appears in the entryway, trailing a tender hand over the Falcon’s underbelly before meeting his sister’s eyes, Poe thinks he might understand.

 

Luke disappears with the General, so quietly Poe doesn’t think anyone will be able to find them for a while. Then it’s just Rey and Finn, talking excitedly as the crowd begins to disperse.

After a minute, Chewbacca appears and interrupts them to give Finn a hug that lifts his feet a few inches above the ground. Poe winces in fear for Finn’s back, but Finn, clearly made of something a lot less fragile than Poe is, just laughs and hugs back. Chewbacca sets him down with a roar before going back into the Falcon.

Finn’s hand immediately finds Rey’s again, and it’s Poe’s own fault that he’s still standing there looking when BB-8 rolls over to him and starts knocking against the backs of his legs.

“Buddy,” Poe whispers admonishingly as BB-8 beeps loudly. It’s too late – when Poe looks up, Rey and Finn are looking at him, and there’s no choice but to step forward.

“Hi,” Poe says to Rey when he’s close enough. He can see Finn looking between them, but he watches the lines of Rey’s face, the set of her shoulders. Poe’s seen eyes like hers before. Just like in the hall outside Finn’s medbay room, he realizes he would trust her, if she asked.

“Hi,” Rey says. She’s smiling at him, and her hand is still in Finn’s, and Poe is about to say that he’ll leave them alone when Finn slings an arm around his neck. Finn is grinning like all his birthdays have come at once; Poe can’t quite look away, and Finn is warm beside him, so he goes.

* * *

When they get to his quarters, Finn suddenly realizes he’s welcoming Rey to a place that’s his – a place he lives and sleeps that isn’t a barracks or a bunk on a ship. It’s a little surreal. She steps inside looking curious and pleased, and Finn can’t help himself.

“I missed you so much,” he says, almost feels silly when he hears himself. But then – he went back into the jaws of the Order for her, faced Kylo Ren. Nothing he could say could tell her more than he already has.

“I missed you too,” Rey says. They’re standing in the middle of his room; she leans in to touch her forehead to his, eyes closed. Finn closes his eyes, too, and just breathes. She’s here – she’s safe, and she’s here, and she’s _home_ , and Finn’s heart is doing something strange in his chest. He’s almost close enough to feel it when Rey smiles. His hands are gentle where he’s grasping her elbows.

There’s a shuffling sound, and Finn looks over to see Poe looking away from them, arms crossed. There’s something tight in the lines of his face.

“Poe,” Finn says. Rey opens her eyes and meets Poe’s startled gaze before it comes back to Finn.

“I’m sorry,” Poe says, uncrossing his arms and stepping back. “I’m intruding. I’ll go.”

It takes Finn a second to realize it’s Rey, not him, who says, “No.” Poe looks at her, just as confused.

Rey’s hand falls from Finn’s neck, tangling with his hand between them, as she turns toward Poe. “I don’t know you like I know Finn, but I can feel how much you mean to him,” she says. “You helped him, and me. And you kept him safe for me.”

Poe only nods, his jaw set. His eyes flick towards Finn and back to Rey.

“I don’t want you to go,” Rey says, tightening her grip on Finn’s hand. “If you would rather stay.” Only now does she sound uncertain, and up close, Finn can see she’s gone slightly pink.

It’s the most beautiful thing Finn’s ever seen.

He has to revise that sentiment when Poe, after shaking his head like he’s convincing himself he’s not hearing things, starts to smile and says, “Okay.” Rey’s answering smile is like the sun.

 

Somehow, nobody comes looking for them the whole rest of the day. Finn would have expected some kind of a welcome party for Rey and Luke, but the base is quiet (or as quiet as it ever gets).

“Luke and the General probably have a lot to talk about,” says Rey, and that’s about all she’ll say about Luke or her time away. Finn doesn’t push it. Whatever kept Luke Skywalker out on an island in the middle of nowhere for a decade is probably Luke’s to tell.

Finn’s distracted, anyway, by the sheer fact of Rey’s presence, used as he’s become to the faint glow of her at the edges of his awareness. It doesn’t help that she and Poe take to each other as easily as – well, as Finn did to both of them. It’s a matter of hours before Poe is leaning into Rey where they’re all sitting on the floor, laughing at some Resistance story of Poe’s. Finn is mesmerized.

They’re still talking by the time it must be night outside, although night on D’Qar falls late and sometimes not at all. Rey is telling them about her home on Jakku, the old AT-AT walker at the top of a sand dune. She looks almost wistful; she smiles when she mentions the Rebel pilot’s helmet, scavenged from the desert.

Poe, who’s listening propped up on one elbow, pushes himself up with an odd look on his face. Rey turns toward him.

“You’ll get one,” he says. “A helmet. And an X-wing.”

At a loss, Rey glances at Finn, who shrugs but can’t help smiling. Poe looks deadly serious.

“Rey, you’re the best pilot I’ve ever seen,” he says earnestly. Rey opens her mouth to say something, but Poe pushes on. “I’m serious! You fly the Falcon like it’s part of you. I heard from Finn what you did on Jakku.”

If Finn’s not mistaken, Rey is blushing again. When she turns toward him he just grins and spreads his hands as if to say, _what are you gonna do?_

“We’re gonna make you a pilot,” Poe says, grinning. “I can’t wait to fly with you.”

Rey looks down, but she’s smiling at her hands.

* * *

Rey wakes up in the middle of the night to see Finn’s bedside lamp still on, casting a soft light over the three of them where they passed out on the floor by Finn’s bed. Finn is flat on his back with Poe’s head on his shoulder; Poe is curled into him in his sleep. Rey is close to Finn, who’s giving off heat like a furnace.

She thinks briefly about reaching up to draw the blanket off of Finn’s bed, or at least turning the light off, but this way she can see the rise and fall of Finn’s chest as he breathes and Poe’s features, soft in sleep.

She falls asleep with an arm over Finn’s waist, brushing Poe’s hand where it rests on Finn’s hip.

**Author's Note:**

> leia's remembering this eminently hurtful moment: [link](http://andysambrgs.tumblr.com/post/135602513735)
> 
> i'm on tumblr at [onthursdays](http://www.onthursdays.tumblr.com), come say hi!


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